


While the future isn’t past

by DarkShadeless



Series: The way you kiss me [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic (Video Game)
Genre: (past) betrayal, Introspection, M/M, Mention of unhealthy coping mechanisms, Other, a touch of drama?, and tendencies toward possibly unhealthy relationship dynamics, canon typical... uh, i think, i'll just warn for the Sith Warrior storyline, mention of Sith training as a child, yeesh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-12
Updated: 2019-10-12
Packaged: 2020-12-09 09:27:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20992523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarkShadeless/pseuds/DarkShadeless
Summary: While the future isn't past, should you let it control you?Raan falls into Yon’s life like a crashing speeder: Suddenly, out of control and the next best thing to on fire.It really should come as no surprise that they fit together like two pieces of the same broken puzzle, considering his own history.





	While the future isn’t past

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: For Yon, at the time he meets Raan, he has already become the Wrath. (Nobody outside of his closest friends knows to associate his real name and face with that title, though.) This is an excursion through his past up to that point.

If you know no fear, you can’t be brave, or so the saying goes.

Yon will admit, privately, that he’s not sure where he stands on that issue. His whole life he has been praised for his bravery. Lauded. They even gave him a medal or two, citing his readiness to serve in the face of insurmountable odds.

The truth of it is, he’s not sure why his dedication deserves such distinction. His _loyalty_ should be recognized, anyone’s loyalty should, but… is to serve unflinching something so special?

Yon’s not sure when he last felt _fear_.

It finds him so rarely. Always has. He looks back upon his childhood, or his adolescence, sometimes now that he is older and more learned and…

He remembers his grandmother coming for him before sun-up when he was twelve to take him out into the woods. Two days’ ride by speeder, just the two of them, and the windows dark so he wouldn’t see where they were going. When they stopped there was… nothing. Trees. What animals there might have made their home in the clearing had all fled from the noise. It felt like they were the only people alive on the entire planet.

Strange, how you recall some details so clearly.

Yon remembers looking up at her, her looking down on him. She always seemed so much larger than life, back then. Grandmother Cass mustered him for a long moment. Then she gave him a vibroknife and said, ‘_May the Force serve you_.’

And she left. She didn’t even look back.

Yon remembers moments like this and he wonders.

How did she do it? Did she ever doubt? Could he have done that? Will he, when the time comes? Will he turn and walk away, from a child of his, leaving them in the wilderness to find their own way back, knowing what lives in the untouched forests of their homeworld? Knowing they may die. Knowing that they know he won’t come for them.

Most of all he wonders that trials like this one still seem ordinary to him upon recollection, when they are given to _him_. It doesn't seem unfair.

And even then, in that clearing, not for a moment was he afraid.

It isn’t fear Yon associates with facing death. It’s determination. Denial. When he was younger it used to be excitement.

His classmates on Korriban, so many older than himself, seem to him like children cowering at shadows. His agemates, apprentices at first, then lords, strike him as cowardly when they flinch in the face of being tested to destruction. Where they hesitate, Yon revels in the challenge.

Will he fall short? Will he die? Maybe. But won’t it be glorious? The danger makes victory all the more intoxicating.

That was _before_. It’s rarer now for him to feel nothing but elation when he’s on the knife’s edge. He has too many responsibilities now.

His life is neatly divided into _befores_ and _afters_. The trials by fire in between slice the sections apart with the precision and merciless irrevocability of a lightsaber strike. They cut him, _changed_ him so fundamentally Yon isn’t sure he walked away from them the same person.

_What he has never admitted to anyone, even those he is closest to, is this:_

_He always knows it’s coming._

_Maybe it is just as well he doesn’t know how to give in to fear._

Premonition runs thick in Yon’s blood and just as unpredictably. He’s no seer. Perhaps he could be, had he dedicated his life to learning to focus his natural abilities. As he hasn’t the future finds him as it ever has, when it will.

It peeks over his shoulder in sparks of intuition when he duels others with words and blades, laughs when he throws himself into battles others deem unwinnable. So often, there is a way you can’t see yet. You just need to be ready to do what it takes to find it. The future is changeable, it is _free_, while it isn’t yet past.

Often, but not always. There are things that are meant to be and doors you have to walk through if you want to get to a certain destination.

The first time Yon comes upon a fixed point is above Quesh.

It has been a long time coming. He has always followed the currents of the Force, by feel and by choice, but for months he had been too bound up in his personal struggles to pay attention. He knows his master too well. Their differences are coming to a head. It’s inevitable. That that conviction might be more than nerves is something Yon only realizes when the Fury breaches Quesh’s orbit.

They hang in the blackness of space above the dusty red sphere and it comes for him, as sudden as it is fierce.

For the span of an eternal second the Force touches him and fills him to the brim. The future is so, so solid he feels he could reach out and touch it. It doesn’t flutter about him in intuition or warning. Instead, it settles into his world in _certainty_.

_This mission is a trap. _

“Hey,” Vette’s voice jars Yon from his reverie, “you alright?”

_This mission is a trap and it is your destiny. You have to go down, you have to go. **Go**. _

He scrounges up a smile. “Sure.”

Thing is, Yon believes in the will of the Force.

That might sound a little counterintuitive, considering that he has made it his life’s work to defy the odds. He tips the scales this way and that to bring circumstances to a conclusion he favors and he uses his talents without reservation to bring about these changes. The Force serves him.

But he also serves _it_. They all do, whether they like it or not. It’s ludicrous to expect that to be different. The Force is greater than all of them, Sith and Jedi alike.

In Yon’s experience though, it rarely actually _cares_ about the outcome of their struggles. It comes to their hands as they bid it and it makes no difference between them. If it favors anyone past their own wits they should consider themselves blessed and ask no questions.

It wouldn’t occur to Yon to find fault in the fact that the Force lends its power to Baras as surely as himself. They must seem so small to something so great. He loves it regardless as a bird loves the unforgiving sky that gifts it a breeze as readily as it will bring a storm down upon it.

If the Force actually _has_ plans or _wants_ things they are probably incomprehensible to a mortal mind.

But sometimes, sometimes it demands things.

Even then you can refuse it, or try to. Nothing made him leave behind his companions and follow through on Baras orders alone. No invisible chain towed him into the cave that almost became his grave. He followed that path of his own free will because the Force wanted him to and he was not prepared to deny it.

In all honesty, he wasn’t sure he would survive.

He wasn’t sure his destiny wasn’t to die there. It could have been.

* * *

Fixed points aren’t the only thing Yon learns he is ready to face with eyes wide open.

In the wake of Voss, on an errand that is but a detour, or should be, Quinn catches him at the airlock with an excuse as clumsy as a newborn tuk’ata. He elbows in on the mission he has found for them and Yon… he looks at him and he _sees_. He has seen for a while.

While he is distracted Quinn shoos Vette away and falls into a picture perfect parade-rest, not a hair out of place. “Allow me to come with you, my lord.”

Yon looks at him, he _sees_ and he smiles. It doesn’t reach his eyes. “Of course. Lead the way, Captain.”

While the future isn’t past, it is free. While choices have not yet been made they aren’t set in stone.

Hope is foolish, but time and again Yon chooses to give those who will betray him the chance to do so, to see if they will. Some days that’s all the trust he is capable of.

Is that cruel? To watch them stumble along, struggling with the paths open to them?

Yet Yon can’t help but test them. _If they choose me_, a little voice whispers at the back of his head, _they should choose me of their own volition. And if they don’t I don’t want them, I don’t want to love them._

Still, he does wonder a little that others never realize when his smiles turn false and his banter to lies, when he can see them for what they are so clearly. Even Jaesa. You’d think she would.

_He always knows when it’s coming. _

_But while the future isn’t past, should you let it control you?_

Yon tries to live in the moment. It’s not easy, sometimes. The future unspools in front of him in multi-coloured threads, begging for him to let his fingers run through them while they withhold the bigger picture. Few things ever truly take him by surprise, even if he couldn't tell you what he will be doing in three years' time.

And then there are those moments where he feels… he _feels_ but he can’t place the what and the why and the how until he’s in the thick of things.

* * *

Raan falls into his life like a crashing speeder: Suddenly, out of control and the next best thing to on fire.

He’s coming apart at the seams. Honestly, when a Jedi has reached the point that unexpectedly stumbling over a Sith in a cage fight gives them a panic attack, they shouldn’t be in the field. They should be nowhere near the field. They should be somewhere off in a nice, safe environment for people with _serious issues_ and _getting help_.

Anyhow. Talking a cathar through a dissociative episode was not how Yon planned to spend that particular evening. That’s why, you know, he signed up for a cage fight, on a no-name planet, where literally no one would know him, especially when he’s not wearing his usual get-up.

But they’re in a district where you can’t leave anyone to freak out quietly, much less a _Jedi_, because they’ll be wearing a shock-collar by morning.

Force preserve him. Why is this fool even here?

Because he’s bent to practicing some extremely unhealthy coping mechanisms, that’s why, or so Yon gathers over the course of their shaky association.

Raan won’t tell him for the longest time _what_ he is coping with and he doesn’t think to pry. They both have their own lives that only intersect when one of them reaches out, looking for a night spent in company that won’t judge them for their scars and how they deal with them.

Company they can… trust. At least this far. At least with this.

The Jedi is... he's troubled most of all, but when Yon looks at him he doesn’t see betrayal looming in the wings.

With Raan none of his masks matter, not the physical ones or the metaphorical ones. When they’re out he’s not the Wrath and he’s no one’s lord or master. He’s not even bound by propriety.

What they share is divorced from their everyday lives, a secret bit of relief they should not be indulging in but seek out anyway. Nothing they do _matters_ in the ways Yon is accustomed to. It does matter, though. That realization dawns on him slowly.

By the time his Jedi friend thinks nothing of sneaking in for a hug and tucking his head under his chin, purring quietly, he has the sneaking suspicion that he is in some serious trouble. They both are.

That’s well before either of them finds out who the other really is. Maybe they should’ve exchanged business cards first thing after all.<strike></strike>


End file.
